HELP! Tenacious Fatal Exception Error / DirectX 5

I am running Windows95 OSR2 on a Pentium Pro200 Dell
Dimension XPSPro200n. Latest BIOS, drivers, etc. My problem
is that during a given Win95 session, the control panel,
in response of "closing" or "Xing" it, will cause this messgae to appear: 'A fatal exception 0E has occured at
0028:C0298C19 in VXD IFSMGR(04) +0000D4F1.' After pressing any key, the computer works normally. It seems to have appeared after either DirectX 5.0 or the Matrox Millenium I with 4MB 3.70 drivers. The Millenium has BIOS 2.70. The motherboard, a Natoma 440FX Intel VS440FX has BIOS A05/1.11.CS1. Everything else from Corel 7, Office 97, Lotus Suite 97, etc, runs fine, without exception, no pun intended. This just happens when closing control panel. It is utterly annoying and is woth a lot of points.

We had a system build similar to yours only a week or two ago, although not a Dell, the components and software were nearly identical. There are several current issues with the Matrox 3.63 and 3.70 drivers, and there is a fix. Go to the Matrox download site and download the 3.51 driver zip file, unzip the file into a temporary directory in the root of your "C" drive, eg:

C:\TEMP

Using the "ctrl" "alt" and "del" keys, close all running programs except "systray" and "explorer". Using windows explorer, go to the temp directory and install the new drivers. These will have no affect on any of the software programs that came with the Matrox card or other windows based programs, however it will solve a compatibility issue.

Now, there are a few open issues that relate to IFSMGR, and here is the current blurb regarding that, as it involves your CD-Rom drive and it's properties settings:
==============================
To resolve this problem, do the following:

1. Click the Start button, point to Settings, and then click Control
Panel.

I tried both the Matrox 3.51 and turning off the disconnect feature on my CD-ROM. The exception still occurs only when I close control panel. I wonder if the C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM\VMM32\IFSMGR.VXD is at fault in any way. Dew, I did crtl-alt-del out all the other running programs except Explorer and Systray. Unfortunatly, the 3.51 drivers don't work and they are not directX 5 aware, thus generating an additional error, no big deal. Thank you for your input, sincerely. I'll keep working on this.

Excuse me, I said rename then delete you .cpl file. That would be stupid. rename them only to something like .how or bak or old or anything that you will remember. You can rename them all at once
from real dos mode, type from C:\>
C:\>CD WINDOWS\SYSTEM then enter then
C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM>REN *.CPL *.OLD then enter and extract your new uncorrupted .cpls from your 95 CDROM.
Don't forget to run scandisk and defrag 1st
-----------
In the event that does not work, let me know please.

Smeebud: Did you read the problem! It has nothing at all to do with a control panel problem!

Howes2: The 3.51 Matrox driver is the only one thus far approved by Microsoft as being trouble free. Based on what you have replied with, if time permits remove DirectX 5 and replace it with DirectX 3. There's little difference between 3 and 5, and at least we can get back to a stable system.

IFSMGR makes all virtual driver dynamic link calls for windows 95. In this respect, the issue is either the video driver or DirectX 5, given that your most recent changes involve DirectX 5 or the Matrox card.

For now, I would remove DirectX 5 and then change the Matrox driver to an approved one and then check the system. If it works properly, then try each new Matrox driver in succession until you find one that works completely. Then try adding DirectX 5 if you really need it.

I read this Dew, "This just happens when closing control panel"
and "My problem is that during a given Win95 session, the control panel, in response of "closing" or "Xing" it, will cause this
messgae to appear: 'A fatal exception 0E has occured...."
Sounds like Control Panel to me. I've seen this before several times and this has worked. Did you read it!!

Well, Smeedbud. Looks like you rack up some more points here.
It wasn't any of the .CPL files that you had indicated, but there was crap left in my control panel After *.cpl was moved out of windows system. What was left was this HP Scanjet crap. It wasnt a *.CPL so I had to remove it by nailing some HP files. But it was a control panel problem, and I now can control it to some degree... Thanks, and Thank You Dew, because I have had fatal exceptions in the past from Millenium stuff, good place to start.

Comment back to Dew...
I --had-- that Hewlett Packard 4c with that cheesy scanJet card installed. I don't recall who made the SCSI Bios, but it wasn't Adaptec. Anyhow, I'm using the 4C elsewhere but the system directory had a DLL file named HPSJ????.DLL that made this idiot exception error. I am an expert with Windows95, NT and WFW software and on my personal machine rarely, if ever, experience any of the types of inexplicable errors...

Thank you howes2,
I often find that we merely point people in the right direction while they, you, end up actually solving the problem. Kind like The 2 heads are better than one saying.
I'd love to talk to you about Xing if you don't mind.
smeebud@gte.net

Nice Dell PC. Dell's tend to work great. My
first inclination is to get rid of osr2 and put
Windows 95 950a on and partiton drives to save
on space. But if you must run osr2 I would
simply delete all the installed drivers on the
PC such as video, network, SCSI and reinstall
each. Next I would backup each setup after a
driver is installed with ERU (Emergency Recovery
Utility) on the Win95 cd-rom. And isolate which
driver create the error. You might just find
that reinstalling all your drivers correct the
problem. Agood trick is to put all of the Win95
cabs files on your PC so you dont need to get
your cd out every time you need to install a
driver the same goes for drivers that are not
included such as video, scsi etc. Hopes this
helps.

In the absence of a fully-fledged GPO Management product like AGPM, the script in this article will provide you with a simple way to watch the domain (or a select OU) for GPOs changes and automatically take backups when policies are added, removed o…

As developers, we are not limited to the functions provided by the VBA language. In addition, we can call the functions that are part of the Windows operating system. These functions are part of the Windows API (Application Programming Interface). U…

The viewer will learn how to successfully create a multiboot device using the SARDU utility on Windows 7.
Start the SARDU utility:
Change the image directory to wherever you store your ISOs, this will prevent you from having 2 copies of an ISO wit…